December 14, 2007

A bit more on Senator Williams

I cited the Abscam case of Senator Harrison A. Willliams yesterday
as an example of how people sometimes don't take "no" for an
answer. It was just an example and I didn't plan to get into the late
senator's whole sad experience with the legal system but several
readers have asked me to say a bit more about that case. I wrote about
it in my 1993 book, Language
Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom (Blackwell)
but here's a shorter answer to one reader's question. Marc Joanisse did
some research of his own in which he found that the quid pro quo used at Williams'
trial was that the senator received stock certificates in a defunct
titanium mine in exchange for his efforts to help some friends (a group
that included his own lawyer) locate some investors for that project.
That's true, and I didn't get into that issue in my earlier post
because I was illustrating a different point. But since readers have
requested, I'll talk about the stock certificate point a little.

After it was reasonably clear that Senator Williams' saying "no" in that meeting with
the "sheik" would not be good enough evidence, the agents
developed a different scenario using the stock certificates as bait. The prosecution
never mentioned that these fake stock certificates were handed to
Williams with no explanation as he was hurrying out of a meeting, or
that from the get-go he thought that reopening the closed titanium mine
was a stupid and impractical pipe-dream, or that he considered
these certificates worthless (which they were). Nor was it mentioned
that he put these stock certificates in the gym bag he was carrying at
the time and casually left it unguarded on the floor of his office
until the time he was arrested. If he was involved in a bribery plan,
he didn't seem aware of it.

Williams believed that the whole mining episode was misguided. His
friends had this wild dream of resurrecting a Virginia titanium mine to
make some money. They asked him to help them find investors but, as the
tapes give clear evidence, he showed little interest in doing so and
never actually tried to find any. But these were his friends and,
unfortunately for him, he treated them in a friendly manner.
Incidentally, the titanium that this mine was capable of producing was
the kind that Sherwin Williams used to make paint; not the type used
for the shields in spacecraft, as was imagined by some. The FBI made
dozens of video tapes of meetings of his friends with undercover
agents, but Williams was on only a handful of them. My analysis of
his conributions in those meetings, outlined in my book, showed
that he was largely silent and uninformed about their plans.

But Williams was a big fish for the government to catch and getting him
involved would be a capstone to their Abscam prosecution. His
involvement could have been explained properly if he had had a
competent criminal lawyer to represent him at trial. Unfortunately he
was represented by a civil attorney who, in the opinion of many, simply
dropped the ball. Williams was convicted of bribery and sentenced to
three years at Allenwood.

My own involvement with Williams came after he was convicted and
waiting to be sentenced. I then lived a block away from his townhouse
and I met him one morning while he was out walking his dogs. When he
asked what kind of work I did at Georgetown University, I explained
that I consulted on criminal and civil law cases as a linguist and his
eyes lit up. He gave me copies of the undercover tapes and I spent the
next thirty days or so working on them, eventually producing a long
linguistic analysis which his office made copies of and distributed to
all 100 senators to read in preparation for his impeachment hearing.
It's doubtful that many of the senators actually read my report but I
got a chance to offer a summary of it on the floor of the senate during
his impeachment hearing. But even this was difficult because only
senators, the senate chaplain, and the senate clerk are permitted to
speak on the floor of the senate. So my report was read aloud by the
senate clerk while I sat next to Williams and silently pointed to the
appropriate parts of the large charts I had made while the reading took
place. After the clerk finished reading, the senators were allowed to
ask me questions. I wasn't permitted to voice my responses so I
whispered them to Williams, who repeated them aloud to his senate
colleagues. By the third day of the hearing, it had become very clear
that the senate was going to vote for his expulsion. During a lunch
break, Williams and I walked through a park near the senate office
building and I suggested that it would probably be wise for him to
tender his resignation rather than be expelled. He agreed, went back
in, and resigned.